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Category Archives: Breakups

As I watched the man that I thought was the love of my life walk into his house with another woman, about a million thoughts ran through my mind. He’s cheating on me? No, he can’t be. He wouldn’t do that. There has to be another explanation. No, you fucking dummy, he’s a fucking lying, cheating, asshole, and you should probably go in there and murder them both. Honest to god, I don’t condone murder for any reason, but it wasn’t until this night where I truly understood how murders of passion happen. Because the sudden white hot rage I felt was astounding.

I fumbled for my phone for a minute, my hands shaking so bad I could barely unlock the damn thing, and I went into my text message conversation with him and told him to get his fucking ass outside immediately. A minute later, he appeared, and I wasted no time unleashing holy hell on him. I can’t for the life of me remember much about what I said, just a lot of “How could you do this to me?” and “Why?” and “Who is she?” and “How long has this been going on.” To which he gave me absolutely nothing but “3 weeks”. I kept trying to get answers from him, and he just sat there, stone faced, saying nothing, not looking guilty or sorry or anything. He looked almost mad that I was yelling at him. He told me we’d talk about it later. And like an idiot, stunned at the absolute lack of fucks given that I was upset, I accepted that, and somehow (and I’ll never know how) drove myself home.

One of the few nice things about living with someone is that when shit hits the fan you don’t have to deal with the misery alone. When I got home, my step sister was asleep on the couch, and she woke when I came in the door. And I told her everything. Told her what happened, and she also was in total disbelief. She had gotten to know Henry over the last few months too. She was blown away that he could ever do that. We talked for awhile, then I talked with my parents, and texted some of my closest people. And somehow I remained fairly calm. I hadn’t cried much, not really. I cried more during the first 10 minutes of Up! than I did in those first few hours after all this happened that night. It was so weird. For any of you who have seen The Holiday with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet, I cried like Cameron Diaz does in the scene where she’s trying to force it. “Just one tear.” She says, but all it is is an act, not actual crying. That was me. I was making the motions, and almost hyperventilating, but no fluid was coming from my face. So bizarre.

I went down to my room, and was sitting on my bed, reeling. I kept replaying everything. I went back into our text conversation and read back to see what I had missed. And in doing so, in sitting at home and stewing for a while, I started to get angry. Livid in fact. Ok, so that motherfucker gets caught cheating, and I’m sent away as if I’m the asshole, while he still gets to go ahead and fuck that woman anyways because now the pesky girlfriend is gone?!? No. Fucking. Way.

I got back into my car and drove back over to his house. And I was pumped up. No more Miss Nice Guy. No more of this bullshit that I’m overreacting. No more letting this fucking asshole get away with doing this shit and not having any real consequences. I stormed up to his front door, and started to wail on it. The lights were still on, so I knew they were in there, her car was still parked across the street. It took a few minutes but he finally opened the door (I’m assuming it took him so long, cause he had to put his fucking pants back on) and boy, did he not look impressed that I was there. He had that mad, stonewall look on his dumb face again. And I just let. Him. Have. It. I can’t remember all of what I said, (again, I think I partially blacked out) but the gist of it was that he was a garbage human, and that if either him or her thought that they could make anything work knowing that this is how they started that they were living in a god damned fantasy world. (And believe me when I tell you that I told him this at a volume where not only did she FOR SURE hear this, but that I’m sure half the neighbourhood heard as well.) I told him how awful it was to make me feel like I wasn’t enough, when he had been cheating on me for weeks! And still he stood there, not saying anything, his stupid face not changing.

The only time I saw him soften, and make a look like I had maybe finally struck a nerve was when I brought up his kids. When I asked him if she would be as good to his kids and love them like I did. If she would play XBox with his son, and Shopkins with his daughter. He didn’t respond, but his face changed, it was slight, but a little bit like he got hit with something, like he finally registered what I was saying, which means maybe there was a human buried in there somewhere after all.

And then, just as quickly as that jolt on his face was, it was gone, the angry, stonewall was back and he told me to leave. He even threatened to call the cops on me if I didn’t. Yup. That’s the piece of shit I was in love with. He does all that to me, and when I justifiably get pissed, he threatens me. So I yelled at him a little more, called him garbage a few more times, and then when I felt like I had said all I needed to, I left.

I got back home, and the second I was back in the comfort of my home, the dam broke, and the tears came. I’ve cried less at funerals. I have been hurt before, sure. I’ve shed many tears over the years for many guys. When Kevin and I broke up, that was hard, but this, what Henry did to me was like nothing else. At least Kevin was man enough to tell me he was unhappy. He told me why. He sat and cried with me, and held me, and apologized profusely for hurting me so much, and all he did was fall out of love with me. Holy fuck if only I would have been given even half of that kind of treatment from Henry I would have been lucky.

I barely slept that night of course, and I spent a good chunk of the night back and forth between texting with my night owl friends who were still awake, and bursting into hysterics where I could barely breathe.

Unsurprisingly I immediately heard from Erik, who had seen my post on Facebook (yeah, I let my dirty laundry out on Facebook. I’m not proud about it, and have since deleted the post, but yeah, I turned 17 again for a minute there in my rage, turns out my Hulk is a petty teen girl with an active social media following. You go girl!) but he offered me some comfort when I needed it the most, and I always will appreciate him for that very reason. He started dating someone in September, which is a damn shame, because in that moment I would have given anything to get a hug from him, but that ship has sailed. (And they are still together, FYI)

The next day I still wanted answers, but unfortunately Henry didn’t want to give me any. I was trying to meet with him, to calmly talk, I just needed some closure. I needed to know why. But that day would never come. He kept bailing saying that he wasn’t feeling well. Ya, no shit, your guilt is chewing up your insides, congratulations, you aren’t a complete fucking monster after all! But after a couple days of still trying to arrange a time to meet with no luck, I said enough. I knew in my heart that he was never going to meet with me. He was never going to face what he did. I left his things that were left at my place on his front step, sent a nice long message getting my final feelings off my chest via voice note, and that was it. I haven’t seen him or heard from him since. And the worst part of all of this? Not once, not that night, not by text message, not once has he said he was sorry.

It’s been just over 4 months since that night happened. And every once in awhile I still have flashbacks to that night, to seeing them walk together into his house. My mind plays even worse tricks on me when I imagine what else they are doing that night, and it still makes me physically ill. I hate that I can’t just erase the memory of not only that night, but of all of it. I know that you can learn something from every experience, but honest to god, if I could time travel back to my birthday last year, and not even meet him, I would. I would undo it all. Because I have no idea what in our relationship was ever real. Cause I have a feeling that he had been seeing her for way longer than 3 weeks. And I also have a feeling that they worked together. And even looking back to the beginning of our relationship I question if he had been seeing someone else when we met. Was that why I didn’t see him very often at the beginning? Was he maybe not as separated from his wife as he led me to believe? Was I the other woman when we got together? I had so many questions, none of which I’ll ever have the answers to, so I’d rather just undo it all. Take all the good, I don’t care as long as all the bad goes with it.

4 months and I’m still healing. I started dating fairly soon after, and have met quite a few new guys. Of course, I’m still single, so obviously none that have become anything. But apart of me is even more closed off now. I don’t really know if I want to let someone in again. How do I move on? How do I open myself up and trust someone with my whole heart? How do I trust another man ever again? And how long do I have to wait for my heart to fucking heal?

Thanks for sticking with me through this clusterfuck of events. I’m sure there is more for me to work out, I now have even more trust issues and less motivation to put myself in the position to get hurt again. So perhaps there will be another post sooner than later, I don’t know. It’s astounding to me that anyone still reads these. But I’m glad you do. And I’m glad that I was finally able to tell that story, as difficult as it was. Maybe I can find some closure on my own.

My first clue that all was not as wonderful in my relationship as I thought it was came around Christmas time. For any of you who are newcomers, I have a very large family of step siblings, and every year at Christmas it can be quite the task to see everyone. And that’s when I’m single. When I’ve been in a relationship over the holidays, it has always been tricky to find a balance. And for Christmas 2017, this was even more so going to be the case. My dad and step mom and all my siblings and nieces and nephews had planned to go to a city one province over, about 4 hours away, to go to a hotel and do some skiing, and getting some shopping in over Christmas.

I really wanted to be with my love and his kids for Christmas. They felt like my family by that point too, but the trouble was that the kids had to return to their mom before we would be getting back from our trip. So, after a lot of figuring plans out with my mom’s side of the family, I ended up spending Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with him and the kids, before heading out of town. I wanted our first Christmas to be perfect. I spent weeks searching for the perfect gifts for his kids, and I even spent a good month knitting him a Doctor Who scarf. (Of course he likes Doctor Who…he’s British) I printed off pictures of him and his kids and framed them, since he kept saying he needed to do that, and never did, and I picked up some of his favourite British cookies to add in as well.

We had a nice supper together, and then I noticed something. He had home baked cookies on his counter top. He wasn’t a baker by any stretch, and they definitely weren’t store bought. I asked him where they were from. He told me that they were from a friend of his, who also has kids, she brought them by. She. She brought them by. The she part hit my stomach like a ton of bricks. But, he didn’t make a deal of it, and it was Christmas, and I thought to myself, “You’re over reacting. He loves you. He is not that kind of guy. He would never cheat on you.” So I ignored my gut, and pressed on, trying to enjoy the rest of the evening as much as I could. But I could feel a slight distance that I hadn’t noticed before.

In the morning, I wanted to wake up next to him, with him wishing me Merry Christmas as soon as we both woke up. I wanted to feel his warmth beside me, and to have him tell me that he loves me. Instead, I woke up as he was getting out of bed, where he went to the living room and I could hear him make a bowl of cereal for himself. I got up, got dressed, and went out to see him, but the warmth wasn’t there. It wasn’t the loving, warm, Christmas morning I was hoping for. And soon it was all about his kids (as it should be) and his parents whom were watching the gift opening over Skype from England. I felt involved, but as an outsider. But I knew that day wasn’t about me, so yet again I thought to myself, “You’re overreacting. He loves you. Today was about the kids. Let them have their day.” And yet again I pressed on.

I pressed on through my time away where his texts were few and far between. I pressed on on New Years Eve when I felt like I had coerced him to go to my dad’s for supper, and then felt stupid when I texted him after he and the kids left my dad’s to see if I could go back to his place for a bit, because he hadn’t invited me over, but his 3 year old daughter did instead. I could feel that something had changed. But every time I acknowledged that something was up, I kept telling myself that I was overreacting. Again. And again. And again.

In the new year we stopped seeing each other all the time, his excuses being that he was busy with work. He got this new promotion in December, so I was ok with not seeing him as much. Because his job was important. Of course his job was important. So little by little distance grew between us. We stopped having sex, we rarely spent the night together, and our evenings were usually cut down to 2 hour chunks before he would leave my place, or I would figure it was time to go home if I wasn’t staying over. I knew the distance wasn’t good, but I just kept convincing myself that we were just going through a rough patch, that things would settle down.

In mid January we hit a point where I thought it was the end, and then another where I thought we would be ok. It was around this point that he decided to go out of town for a night away with “an old buddy” he claimed to have, even though he and I hadn’t spent a full night together in months. That day, I snapped. Our first really big fight, and because I never saw him anymore, it happened over texting. That should have been it. I should have just ended it then. But, of course, I downplayed it, told myself I was being over dramatic, and too overbearing. He loves you, I kept telling myself.

Once in awhile he would do something that would reinforce the idea that he loved me. After that night away, he and I planned a full day together. A full day without work, without the kids, just him and I. And you know what happened that day? My niece was born that day. My beautiful baby niece who I was so excited to meet decided to come a week early, and now I had to choose whether to spend the day travelling to meet her, or to wait a day or two and spend the day with Henry instead. So I chose to meet her, and he came with me. It was the best of both worlds, although I felt guilty that I was changing our plans that day. I felt guilty and a little frustrated that that day of all days would be the day that baby was born. How ludicrous is that?

And the denial and the excuses, and the telling myself I was crazy went on for weeks. Then, 3 days after our mundane Valentine’s Day, everything fell apart.

It was a Monday night (it was a holiday Monday, Family Day if you can handle the irony there) and we had just come back from dropping his kids off with their mom (she lives 2 hours away, so we met at the halfway point for drop offs) On the way back to town, we decided to go somewhere for supper. We went, and it was fine, but he was busy on his phone through a lot of (claiming to be reading stuff about his soccer team) and I was just kinda trying to ignore it as much as I could. After we were done eating, we went back to his place. It was still early, so I followed him up to his door. When we got his his door, there was a heart shaped Valentines streamer on the doorknob to his front door. Weird, I thought, and he looked kind of puzzled by it, but he said that it must belong to the neighbour kid (he lived in a basement suite and the lady upstairs had a kid) and again, I thought nothing of it.

We went inside and sat on the couch for a few minutes watching tv. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back out, he was putting his jacket on. He had this weird look on his face. I asked him what was going on, and he told me that he had gotten a text or a call (I don’t remember which he said) from his ex wife and that something had happened with his son. He wasn’t sure what, but he had to leave right away. I hurriedly put my jacket on, and left with him, him not saying so much as a goodbye, and me telling him to let me know what was going on. I got into my car, and watched as he pulled out of the driveway, and drove down the street and out of sight. I sat in my car for a minute feeling like this really was weird. I was also concerned for his son. What could have happened?

I put my own car into drive, and started to head home. I only lived 5 minutes or so from his place, but about half way home my gut was screaming at me that all of this felt weird. That he had been acting strange for weeks now, and that this didn’t feel right. Something didn’t feel right here. So instead of going home, i finally, FINALLY listened to my gut, and I drove around, back towards his house. But this time, I went down the opposite end of the street that I usually came down. And sure enough the first thing I saw when his house came into view was his vehicle parked back in his motherfucking driveway. The second thing I saw was him, across the street from his house, standing next to a car parked in front of the neighbours, with another woman. I drove past them, and parked a couple houses down just in time to see the two of them walk into his house with his arm around her waist, through my rear view mirror…

To be continued my blueberries. This is one of the hardest stories I’ve ever tried to tell, so I need to do it in smaller doses. I’ll be back with the finale soon.

I know, I know. It’s been well over a year. It’s been a long time since I’ve put pen to paper (or thumbs to iPhone screen as it were) but I feel like it’s about time I tell you all (the people who still come here, which by the way, wow! There are a lot of you who still come here from time to time! What link on Google sent you here of all places?!) anyways, where was I, oh yeah, it’s about time I tell you all about the most recent disaster in my love life. I figure it’s as good a time as any really, I’m sick with a stomach bug, so while my body is a total shit show (har dee har har) I should also get out the bug that is rotting the inside of my heart too. Maybe it will be cathartic. Or maybe I’ll just end up crying on the toilet. Who knows, that’s the fun of an adventure! (And to any of you disgusted by my literal shit talk, you know what the bible says, let the first guy who has never had the runs be the first to judge the girl crying on the toilet because of her ring of fire. OKAY, I’M DONE NOW, but y’all gotta admit, some of you out there smiled at that, I know it!)

So the last time you and I were here together I had just gotten back into the same rut as always with Erik. We were seeing each other quite frequently at that point. But I knew that we were never going to be more. And I was the one pulling away. I started to be the one to go, “Well, it’s about time to hit the ol’ dusty trail.” And would be getting dressed and leaving before things could get too 2012 “Olivia falling for Erik” again. Cause I knew this song and dance. I wasn’t going to be the one getting hurt this time. I wasn’t going to let myself fall for him again knowing full well that he was never going to want me. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to let my feelings or the picture of a potential (albeit completely unattainable) future together stop me from finding someone amazing.

So, last year, on my birthday, May 30th (mark it in your calendars, next year I expect presents damnit!) I signed up (again) on the dating site. And by the end of that night I had started to chat with the man who would (spoiler alert!) eventually shatter my heart and world to a million pieces.

His name was Henry (it wasn’t really, but you know the drill) and he was pretty great. He was a few years older than me, he was smart, funny, had a good job at a bank, he played the guitar, and he was British. He was great, but not perfect. He had been married, and when we met his divorce was only in the works, but not actually final. And, he had two kids. A son (8yrs old) and a daughter (3yrs old). But besides everything, we hit it off, and I figured, what the hell, we could at the very least meet and see where that goes.

A week after my birthday we met at a restaurant here. Nothing fancy, just a nice place where we could chat a bit. Over the week since we had first messaged online, we had continued to text and had even had a 2 hour phone call a few nights before we met. And the more I talked to him, the more I liked him. On the phone that night I told him about my love of chocolate, and he informed me that there is a Cadbury land in England that is reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. He also gave me the hot tip that Walmart sells giant ass Cadbury Dairy Milks in the British food isle for only 5 bucks. I was excited about that cause I was (and still am) both cheap and chunky. So imagine my sheer delight when he got out of his vehicle at the restaurant carrying a giant ass Dairy Milk. We hadn’t even known each other for 5 minutes and I knew that I liked this guy.

The date from then on just kept getting better and better. We sat and chatted for 4 and a half hours. We literally closed the place down, and didn’t even realize it. I really liked him. So when there was talk of a second date, then a third, and then we were officially a couple, I was over the fucking moon. It just all seemed to work. We saw each other as much as we could, but he had his kids quite a bit, so at the beginning I didn’t see him as much as I would have liked. But his kids came first, because of course they were, so it was fine.

Finally after about two months of us being together I finally decided it was time to meet the kids. I was just as nervous to meet his kids as I was to meet him for the first time. It was the first time I had ever been dating a single dad, and while I have two wonderful step parents of my own, and I work with children for a living, I really had no idea how I was supposed to be with his kids. I knew that how I was with them, and how they felt about me would be a big deal. We met at a McDonalds for supper. The kids seemed shy at first, but after the chicken nuggets were done, they were able to play in the play place, so I ceased to exist to them after that point. I would have had to be dressed up like Ronald McFucking McDonald to get their attention once the play place became an option.

After that evening I got to spend time with him and his kids way more. His kids seemed to like having me around. His son would show me all the stuff on his Minecraft game, and his daughter would beg me to play Shopkins or Barbies with her. Henry would tell me that they would ask about me when he FaceTimed with them, and when they knew I was with him when they chatted, they wanted to say hi to me too. And I was falling in love. Not just with Henry, but with his family. I felt like they were falling for me too. The way I would sometimes catch Henry just looking at me with this stupid smile on his face, or how his kids faces would light up when they saw me. I could feel like we were falling together. I was dying to tell him, but resisted, I wanted him to say it first, so I waited patiently for him to make the first move. (I know this probably says a lot about who I am as a person, but I don’t care) So you can imagine how thrilled I was when one night after spending the day with him and the kids, as I was on his front step, giving him a goodnight kiss as I was leaving, he whispered in my ear that he loved me.

Things were going great. I was on cloud 9. I started to think of our future together. While I was falling deeper in love with him and his kids, he was trying to speed up his divorce. And the closer he got to that, the more I let myself picture us moving in together, him proposing, the words I would say to his kids on our wedding day, and how the kids would react if they were finding out that they were going to have a little brother or sister. I even pictured life with him as a retired couple. He talked all the time about one day moving back to England, and I could picture us, old, sitting on a porch swing somewhere in England together, bellies full of Cadbury, him playing his guitar for me while I knit something for the grandkids. It was a lovely picture.

However, as you already know from my opening paragraph (and the rest of my blog, let’s be honest) that this story doesn’t have a happy ending. And in order to get to that not so happy ending, I’m unfortunately going to have to leave you all in suspense for a little while. Cause I’m tired. And feeling blah.

I’m not sure what is harder; watching someone you love walk out of your life, or watching that person you once loved walk back into your life with his new girlfriend in tow.

For almost a year now I have been working part time in the retail merchandise store of the football team here in Lakeview in the location that is right in the stadium. As anyone who has been following me for more than a minute will know that in every way this is my dream part time job. Sure, it’s still shitty retail work, but at least it’s shitty retail work that revolves around something I’m super passionate about. That, and I get a pretty bitchin’ discount.

The reason why the location itself is important to this story is that we had been in the old stadium up until the beginning of March. That stadium was very well loved, spending about 100 years as the foundation of football history in this province. But because of its lengthy run, it was showing its age. The seats were uncomfortable and wooden, when you were “sheltered” at the concessions when it was raining, the ceiling above you poured water like it was a spaghetti strainer, the concessions were few and very far between, as were the run down bathrooms that only had freezing cold water in the taps. If it was raining and your seats were on the east side you were fucked, and if it was hot and sunny you were sunburnt and partially blind by the end of the game. The store I worked at was no better. It was tiny. The store was essentially a shoebox. It was small, the ceilings were low, the lack of windows made the room dark and depressing, the carpet stank and you were either freezing your ass off or cooking like bacon – there was no in between – just like having seats on the east side of the stands.

So a few years ago, the powers that be decided to chip a HUGE chunk of change (huge relative to this province, it was in the ballpark of $300 million, which I think is small potatoes compared to stadiums in other places, but still) to build a shiny new stadium just down the street. This new stadium makes the old one look like an actual pile of shit. The seats are still uncomfortable (because sports seating always sucks), but the view to the field is spectacular. Everything is big and bright and beautiful. The jury is still out on the weather factor because we still don’t have a roof, but at least most of the seats seem relatively covered from a similar overhang that the west side of the old stadium had (where the only advantage to the nosebleeds was that you were pretty much guaranteed to be somewhat protected during adverse weather conditions). All in all, I am completely impressed by the new digs, to the point where I may have to quit my job if they don’t let me book time off to go to at least one game here this season.

The store is amazing. We upgraded from a shoebox to a mansion of a building, with high ceilings, a wall of floor to ceiling windows, where everything is white and bright with big open spaces, TVs in every corner of the store, and a big window filled entrance out into the stadium itself where you can see all the action. We moved over from the old store to the new one at the beginning of March, and every fan that has come in to the store has been in awe of the opulence that we as football fans have never been accustomed to in our province. We finally look like a professional football team (at least off the field anyways).

Because of this new location, we have had a lot of people come from far and wide to see the new digs. Most people don’t even come to buy anything, they just want a sneak peek of the new place. This past week was especially busy as the city hosted the CFL’s first ever CFL Week, which was comprised of various high profile players past and present from across the league, and events for fans of all kinds. So when I went into work on Sunday, as CFL Week was wrapping up, I was expecting it to be busy. I was anticipating a various number of people to walk into the store.

I did not however anticipate seeing Kevin walk through those doors.

You know those big windows I was gushing about a moment ago? Well I love them even more now, because while we as staff can see out of them just fine, there is just enough of a glare on them from the outside that you can’t actually see into the store until you are pretty much right up to the doors. So I saw Kevin long before he came inside. As I was unlocking the door to open, I noticed a familiar truck parked across the street. Huh, I thought. That looks a lot like Kevin’s truck. I see trucks like his all the time in town, so I didn’t think too much about it, but I felt this weird twinge in my stomach about it. I wandered around the store, talking to my coworkers, while periodically checking on that truck parked across the street.

After a few minutes I noticed that someone had gotten out of that truck. A girl. Then, a second later, Kevin emerged from what was indeed his truck. It didn’t even feel real. It felt like I had dreamt it all up. After all, I had thought about running into him out in public a million times. I’ve gone through a million different scenarios of when and where I would bump into him, and in my mind I always looked amazing, and would always say the best things, and present myself in such a way that he would leave and regret ever letting me go. I’ve imagined him coming into my work, but I never thought it would actually happen. A couple minutes after he got out of his truck, his grandparents pulled up and parked in front of him, got out of their vehicle and joined Kevin and the girlfriend on the sidewalk. They stood there chatting for quite some time, and I sat there like a damn idiot, watching them, and praying to whatever deity was listening that they wouldn’t come into the store.

Let me tell you guys, prayer doesn’t do shit, because sure enough, after a few minutes of chatting outside, the four of them started walking towards the store. This is actual footage of me realizing that I was seconds away from seeing Kevin for the first time in a year.

Luckily one of the girls I work with fairly regularly was close enough for me to call her over, and briefly explain what was happening before I basically ran into the stock room, and hid. I stayed in there for a good 10 minutes before it dawned on me that they could be in the store for awhile, and that I legitimately couldn’t hide in there all day without catching shit from the managers that were there that day. So after having a slight panic attack, and with a bucket full of butterflies in my stomach, I peeked into the store, saw that at least Kevin & Co weren’t anywhere right in front of the stock room door, and proceeded into the store with extreme caution.

I heard his voice, and saw the 4 of them looking at stuff across the store from me with my peripheral vision, but I wasn’t going to dare risk catching his gaze. So maybe he saw me at that point, I guess I’ll never know, but I found my coworkers, they gave me a bunch of shirts to go fold, and I spent the next 25 minutes in the change rooms folding shirts with my hair pulled down to cover as much of my face as possible until I heard the four of them leave, and my coworkers came to tell me they were gone.

I wanted to cry. And scream. And throw up. I hated that I ran away. I hated that after a year and a fucking half, the thought of seeing him still hurts. But more than anything I despise the fact that he was the one who fell out of love with me, he broke my god damned heart to a million fucking pieces but he gets to be the happy one, while I am miserable as fuck, wading through piles of shitty dating app messages and meeting a constant stream of assholes. How is that fair? It just makes me so fucking angry.

So now, I’m picking up the pieces – again. And I somehow have to try and convince myself that all this will work itself out in the end. I don’t know how to do that, because right now I’m feeling lower than I ever have. It’s so stupid that I still hold on to what I had, and what I won’t have, and I wish it would all just go away.

All I know is that for all this bullshit I’ve gone through, the least the universe could do for me is throw me a bone in the form of a beautiful football player. I mean honestly, at this point I deserve that for fuck’s sake.

I’m not entirely sure when exactly my life became the script of a really poorly written sitcom, but here we all are, she writes as she continues to eat the half of a chocolate pie she pulled out of the fridge for breakfast, as she is too damn lazy to make eggs, obviously trying to illustrate the point she was trying to make.

This is where I am at now. Comical levels of sadness. So comical in fact that I could actually be Sadness if anyone ever did the live action version of Inside Out. Which is a vast departure from the state I was in the last time I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard as it were) to write my story. The last time you and I were together, I was sitting on the beach with Chuck, so happy to have a wonderful, beautiful new boyfriend. I was enjoying our time together, and enjoying having someone in my life that I liked. Of course, because it’s me, and my life after all is a sitcom, that feeling of joy didn’t last more than a full month after that. I’m not sure if it was the sleeping with someone else that ruined it for me, the fact that he slept with someone who found out she had Chlamydia, or the fact that he couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want to stay with him because of those two facts (he had apologized for cheating after all, AND he got me meds to take just in case I had gotten Chlamydia from him, and hey, he at least told me he cheated, he didn’t have to, so isn’t he a great guy, and can’t we just work things out?) and then proceeded to essentially stalk me for the following month till I threatened to go to the cops. I’m not sure which of those three things really made me not like him. I mean he’s obviously such a catch, I should have just been thankful that he wanted to be with me. *eyes roll so far back into my head that I go blind*

After all that I took a little break from dating, haha, just kidding, no I didn’t, I got back onto Plenty of Fish and Tinder almost immediately, and by December, I had started meeting new people. It was pretty slow going, not much to write about, until I got a message from a ghost named Max. He sent me this really long message, apologizing for being such an asshole to me, and asked if I’d like to meet him for dinner sometime. I messaged back laying down the law that if we were going to hang out again it would be on my terms. So we did, and it was like a year had not passed. I got the same feeling I had last year when we had spent time together, and it wasn’t actually until we were having sex, that I felt different. Yes, I slept with him, can we save the judgment (I’m projecting here, I know this, shut up) for later in this post? Cause I’m betting you are gonna need all the judgment you got for later. Anyways, when we were making the sex it was like my brain woke up and reminded me of how he treated me last year. I started to give myself shit, like all he has to do is say he’s sorry, pay for your meal and buy you some really fancy expensive yarn (yes, he did that, and it’s beautiful and I can’t decide what I want to make with it) and you are back in his bed, and feeling like absolute garbage? What in the actual fuck is the matter with you? So needless to say I left his place very unsettled and unsatisfied. We saw a movie together a week or so later, and then after that you know what happened? History repeated itself. I just stopped hearing from him. Again. Because if I’ve learned one thing in this life it’s that if you do something you know you shouldn’t be doing, the universe or whatever the fuck will show you exactly why you shouldn’t have done that thing.

Which brings me to right now. Yes there have been more funny dating stories that I could share, and a few more that are less than hilarious, but since we are talking about letting in blasts from the past when you fucking know better, and since it’s fresh in my brain, we come to last night. After a few months of less than impressive dating stats, I wrote a big longwinded post on Facebook about the woes of dating, specifically online dating. I was doing my best to keep things as light and funny as possible, but I obviously came off almost as dark and depressed as I have been lately, because no more than 5 minutes after I hit post, I received a text message from the infamous Erik. If you don’t know who Erik is, then who even are you, and how did you find this tiny little blog in the most random corner of the internet? Now, hearing from Erik is nothing new. In fact, I’ve been hearing from him here and there a lot since Kevin and I split. We’ve only seen each other in person a few times, but every few weeks I get a text from him, just him saying hello, or telling me something he knows I’d find interesting or funny, like a couple months ago, when a former football player I used to enjoy was working on a production he was involved with. Our interactions have been very friendly, and while I am always painfully aware of our past whenever I see him or hear from him, overall I think we have made it to this place beyond the awkward where we can maybe actually be friends. With or without the benefits.

Last night he could tell I was down. And no matter what the motivation to message me was, he was the only person who reached out to ask if I was ok. He saw through the sarcasm of my post, and could tell that things maybe weren’t as lighthearted and humorous as I was trying to make it seem. He took what could have been an awful night for me, and made it into a really fun night by doing something not many people in my life can do for me right now – he was just there. All we did was text, but we chatted about everything from old Simpsons episodes to the thought of having kids one day to him telling me I should audition for a production sometime. We even cleared the air about what happened between us. He told me he still feels guilty that he couldn’t give me all the things I wanted with us, and I told him that it’s nothing to feel guilty about, that you can’t force yourself to love someone when you simply don’t. We talked for almost 4 straight hours, and it was probably the first time since we met over 10 years ago that we actually opened up to each other like that. Regardless of how I’m feeling today about it (slightly confused, and mad at myself that my heart still skips a tiny bit when I see his name appear on my phone) I’m so glad that it happened. I’m glad someone, even the most unlikely person was there for me when I just needed to talk to someone.

So judge away. I know I’m judging me. And I know I’ll never learn. But at least with me not learning, it gives me a reason once every 6 months at least to come back and work my shit out here. Thanks for sticking around a little while longer with me.

A few weeks ago, as I was thinking of writing this, I was sitting on a beach near Lakeview, looking out at a handful of little kids, who were making sand castles, splashing in the water and having fun as only children can on the last weekend of summer vacation. It was bright and warm like summer days should be, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The days leading up to this one were almost unbearably hot (you know, for Canada anyways) but this day it was a touch cooler, as if it was a subtle reminder of summer’s finality and the weather that is just around the corner waiting for us. This actually suited me quite well, because even though I enjoy a hot summer day as much as the next person, a cool day at the beach meant that I could relax in the sun without sweat pooling in my ass crack.

If that paragraph sounds at all familiar, then clearly you have been to this blog before as you may recognize it from my last post from almost three months ago. I will often plagiarize myself when I’m finding it difficult to come up with new things to write. I would just repost what I wrote three months ago, but thankfully, things have changed just enough that I can rewrite the rest.

See, this time around, a good few months since I wrote the first bit, as I was sitting on that same beach my mind not once wandered to anything Kevin related like it had before. I looked out at the people on their floaties and only thought of how much fun it would be to have a pizza shaped one like one of the teenagers out there had. When I was in the (fucking freezing) cold water and saw the boats out in the distance drive by I thought only of how cold I was going to be in a moment when the waves that those boats created hit me and splashed up over my tits, whose nipples already had the ability to cut glass. And when I looked at the yacht club, I still thought of how fucking ridiculous it is for there to be a yacht club at this beach, but I also thought about how nice it would be to own one of the pontoon boats (or as the fancy people here like to call them, yachts) that was parked in the marina. But not even once did my brain think of these things in relation to Kevin.

This is probably because this time, sitting next to me on my beach blanket was a beautiful, kind hearted, sweet, caring, funny, intelligent man who for whatever reason had decided he liked me enough to call me his girlfriend. I’m still a little fuzzy on why he likes me; he seems to not care so much about the baggage that I have definitely brought with me into this relationship, and in fact, he seems perfectly ok with helping me carry this baggage. So there I sat, on my beach blanket, in the warm sun with a cool breeze, next to this half naked man whose dark chocolate skin glistened with sweat and lake water in the sun rays. We talked, he told me about his family back home, we swam, I froze, we snacked and relaxed and he even got mistaken for a football player (because apparently, in Lakeview, if you are black, you of course are a football player, so between this and the ridiculous “Yacht Club”, I see how cartoonish the place I live in is).

We met at the beginning of August. It wasn’t in anyway an earth shattering exchange really. He messaged me online, and seemed far more normal than most guys that had been lately. Our first date was simple, we met at a Boston Pizza, which for those of you who are unfamiliar, is the sit-down restaurant equivalent of a McDonald’s in that there are no less than three of these restaurants in any given city, at least in my province anyways. We chatted, got to know one another, and then said our goodbyes and that was it. We met up a few more times, and had been seeing eachother every couple of days before we decided to be exclusive, and that seems to be that.

It’s not that this new boyfriend has made me forget or not care about the past. I would never naively believe that that would ever be the case. I still think about Kevin from time to time, against my best attempts not to. And I still absentmindedly bring him up in conversation, in a “well when Kevin and I lived together…” or “when Kevin and I were booking our trip to Cuba…” kind of way. He was a huge part of my life for a while there, so while I try to do my best to suppress the Kevin-ing, it tends to raise its ugly head from time to time.

Things are thankfully getting better. I’m glad I found this new man, and hope things will work between us. So far our biggest issue is that we want to spend more time together and are finding it hard to balance our lives in a way that we can see each other several times a week, so I’m taking that to be a good sign.
I guess only time will tell. All I can do is hope the best, work for what I want and bundle the fuck up, because that summer beach day has long since gone, the leaves are already half off the trees here, and winter is definitely closer than I’d like to believe it is. Fuck. Wish me luck. On all those things.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting on a beach near Lakeview, looking out at a bunch of little kids, making sand castles, splashing in the water and having fun as only children can in the summer. The weather isn’t even very nice. It was hot and mostly sunny out about an hour and a half ago when we first arrived, but then the clouds rolled up, covering the once nice bright shining day, turning it overcast and cool. This actually suits me quite well, because even though I enjoy a hot summer day as much as the next person, a cool day at the beach means I can relax and read a really great book without sweat pooling in my ass crack.

I sit and look out on the water, and I try very hard to prevent my brain from wandering into the memory banks where the now distant memories of me and Kevin at this particular lake live. I’m failing at this by way, and not even just a little bit. I see people on a gigantic 6 person inflatable party barge, and it reminds me of when Kevin and I lounged on his party barge the first summer we were together. I see boats in the distance, people fishing or skiing, and my brain is back on Kevin’s best friend’s boat, and we are catching fish early in the morning because that’s when fishing here is the best. I see the yacht club and think, “why in the fuck do we have a yacht club here? You live here. You ain’t fancy. These aren’t even yachts, they are boats. Small ones in fact.” And then I remember last summer when Kevin and I took a drive out to the beach, just for something to do on a lazy Sunday and we went for a nice walk. As we walked past the “yacht club” I made a similar joke about how ridiculous it is to try to be fancy in this neck of the woods. It was one of the last days we spent just the two of us, just enjoying each other’s company.

I’m trying (and failing) to move on in general. Sure, I’ve had the Maxes and Marks, and the Eriks and the Shamuses, and they have all been fun. Snapchatting, Tindering, and Tweeting have filled my time, and given me brief moments of flirty entertainment, but they have all been a distraction from the fact that I am so unbelievably miserable with my life. Sure, on the surface I seem fine. I crack the jokes, I smile a lot, and my selfie game is on point, but I’m fucking miserable. And I have been since October.

And it’s not just the loneliness. Well, it’s mostly about that, but not all about that. I’ll also spare you the lengthy essay about my depression over being 31, single and childless. To say that that record has been overplayed would be the understatement of the century.

I’m in a rut. A big one. My life feels just like I’m going through the motions, no ebbs or flows, just steady monotony. I have far too much free time to think and overanalyze every detail of my life, and unfortunately because of this, Kevin continues to live rent free in my brain. We’ve been apart for 9 months (has it really been that long already?!) and yet I still haven’t moved on like I wish I would have by now. I have never had such a hard time getting over someone. Mind you, I’ve never loved anyone like I loved Kevin, so I guess that makes sense. I just want this to be done. I want the fact that he unfriended me on Facebook to not bother me. I want to not constantly wonder if he’s got a new girlfriend (pretty sure he does) and wonder what she’s like, and if he loves her yet; if he can see the future with her that he couldn’t see with me. I know I said a few months ago that I wouldn’t undo all that Kevin and I had for the world, but after 9 months with this soul consuming, gut wrenching pain, I want it gone. All of it. All of the good and every last shred of the bad.

They say it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? I call bullshit on that. Maybe this is only true when you are old and on your death bed and have spent your entire life madly in love with your soulmate, only to be taken away from them by the fate of death that plagues us all. But if you have your heart smashed into a million pieces by the one you love when you felt like you had your whole life ahead of you with this person, fuck that. It’s better to not have loved at all. Life shouldn’t be about pain. Love shouldn’t be about pain. Love is supposed to make your life better, not indescribably worse.

I feel sorry for the guy who wants to be my next love. He’s going to have so many walls to climb over or knock down. I’ve put these all up to protect my heart, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it be that easy to get to it again. Hell, forget getting to my heart, he’s going to have a bitch of time just getting me to go for coffee with him in the first place. As it is, I’ve only met one new guy since I broke up with Mark a month and a half ago. I even deleted my dating profile, although I still have Tinder. I guess a small piece of the pre-Kevin Olivia still lives on, even if post-Kevin Olivia would prefer to go live in a cave somewhere.

My brain keeps telling me that all this will pass. One day I will wake up and feel like my old self, and I won’t give a single fuck what Kevin is doing. My heart however is like the weather. Some days it’s warm and sunny, but in a moment’s notice it turns dark and cold.